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The Palghar blast is suspected to have occurred in a boiler room and efforts were on to douse the fire in the factory precincts.

Eyewitnesses said the explosion, “sounding like a huge bomb”, happened when many were preparing to retire for the night.

A powerful blast followed by a massive fire ripped through a private chemical manufacturing company in the Tarapur MIDC area in Maharashtra’s Palghar late on Thursday night, police said.

Thirteen people were injured in the explosion, and they have been rushed to a medical facility. Three of them are said to have suffered serious injuries.

According to Palghar Control police official Pramod Pawar, the blast occurred around 11.15pm in the chemical company’s plant. A rescue operation is underway.

“The blast, cause of which is not yet clear was so deafening that it was heard in a radius of 10 km, and houses and buildings were shaken,” Pawar told IANS.

Palghar district collector Prashant Narnaware, who reached the accident site early Friday, told ANI: “Around 11:30 pm, we came to know about the incident. Police machinery, revenue machinery and health machinery...contributed their best to extinguish the fire. Our work of rescue is still continuing.”

The blast is suspected to have occurred in a boiler room and efforts were on to douse the fire in the factory precincts.

Eyewitnesses said the explosion, “sounding like a huge bomb”, happened when many were preparing to retire for the night.

However, scared and shaken by the explosion, many feared it was an earthquake and hundreds rushed out on to the streets and sat there.

SAINT PETERSBURG: A
homemade bomb blast at a supermarket in the Russian city of Saint Petersburg injured 10 people Wednesday, officials said, sparking a
probe into attempted murder.

"According to preliminary information, an explosion of
an unidentified object occurred in a store," a spokeswoman for Russia's Investigative
Committee, Svetlana Petrenko, said in a statement.

The blast was caused by a "homemade explosive device
with the power equivalent to 200 grammes of TNT filled with lethal
fragments," she said.

"The investigation is looking at all possible causes of
what happened," she said, adding that a probe for attempted murder had
been launched.

The incident comes several months after Russia's second city
was rocked with a metro bombing in April which killed 16 people and amid
concern that hundreds of Russian citizens who travelled to fight alongside
jihadists groups abroad could pose a mounting security challenge back home.

Rattled by a one-two
punch of betrayal and scandal, Donald Trump on Thursday tried to block the
publication of a bare-knuckle book that portrays his White House as a fetid
stew of backbiting, incompetence and dysfunction. The publishers
responded by moving the release date up by four days to Friday. Trump instructed his
lawyers to prevent the release of “Fire and Fury: Inside
the Trump White House” -- an expose by author and political muckraker Michael
Wolff -- which quotes key Trump aides expressing serious doubt
about his fitness for office. The book -- which
paints Trump as mentally unstable and far out of his depth -- quotes at length
his former ally and chief strategist Steve Bannon, who also received a “cease and
desist” order from Trump’s attorneys. “Your publication of
the false/baseless statements about Mr. Trump gives rise to, among other
claims, defamation by libel, defamation by libel per se, false light invasion
of privacy, tortious interference with contractual relations, an…